tell me about your first book.
It’s so much fun. Peter Leeson dishes out clichés in a charming way. it speaks of the brackish depths and of walking on the plank. but, essentially, it is a book on economics in the world of the pirates of the caribbean of the seventeenth century. is a very good example of the way pirates have been adapted to the needs of different people. With Leeson, he sees them as proto-capitalists in a free market. others see them as proto-Marxist, while the gay movement has decided that the pirates were the pioneers of equal rights. the problem is that people become selective and begin to select the elements that will support their thesis. Leeson picks up the idea of a brotherhood, an early type of democracy. so, although I find his book interesting because of his new way of looking at things, I can’t say that I really subscribe to all of his opinions. my model of piracy is one of socialized crime. he sees them as a great example of a privatized effort, while I see them as instruments of the state.
You are reading: Best books about pirates
what about your next book, buccaneers of the caribbean?
This book is about the same pirates as Leeson, but takes a completely different approach. what buccaneers of the caribbean does is give us a more vivid vision of the reality of things. the jack sparrows, the johnny depps – the pirates of the caribbean – were involved in a land war, fighting against the spaniards. Jon Latimer suggests that fighting the Spanish in the New World made them front-line troops in British imperialism. And I find that argument much more convincing than Leeson’s. Of course, many of them were motivated by greed. all pirate activities are to earn money, that’s why they do it.
but, latimer also brings out the strong anti-catholic tension in the pirates of the caribbean. Many of them were ardent Protestants from England and Holland who wanted to fight the Catholics. They may not have even realized it themselves, but the culture that produced them suggested that it’s okay to fight Spain. There were times in the 17th century when England was at war with Spain and times when they weren’t, but there is a feeling that, war or not, it was always all right to attack the Spanish!
There is this idea of the age of the buccaneer in the book. what does that mean?
well, we need to back up a bit. In the 1580s and 1590s England is at war with Spain and there were many privateers. privateers are people who work as mercenaries who have letters of commission that allow them to attack the merchant marine of a hostile nation. They didn’t have a very large army in those days, so it was a way to get adventurers to fight the war for you. the people who do that are not pirates, they are corsairs, and that means they have almost legal status and these were the buccaneers. There’s a great story in the book about a famous pirate, Henry Morgan, who was so outraged when a London pamphlet described him as a pirate that he sued them. He ended up winning the princely sum of £200. I find it incredible that he had a solicitor in London who could bring a libel action. privateers clung to the distinction between privateer and pirate because pirates were criminals, but in everyday life there really wasn’t much difference between them.
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what kind of image did pirates have in those days?
depends on where in the world you go. the pirates of the barbarian coast saw themselves as soldiers of allah. they described themselves as mujahidin, in a maritime jihad against the invading christians. the barbarian coast was the interface between christianity and islam, where the two cultures meet.
So where did the idea of swashbuckling pirate jack sparrow come from?
Even in the 17th and early 18th centuries, there is a kind of grudging admiration for pirates in literature. And later, in the 18th century, you have more and more the feeling that the pirate is an outlaw, more like the robin hood of society. they are stealing from the evil Spanish conquistadors and the Ottoman empire, which makes them the good guys.
to your next book, the legend of barbary.
Fisher’s book is a wonderful corrective to the prejudice we have about the pirates of the Barbary Coast. almost goes too far. it suggests that the West has approached the idea of North African pirates with prejudice, because they are Islamic. fisher says: why don’t we look at how the west relates to north africa, and in particular the four barbarian states? These were Morocco and the three Ottoman states in North Africa: Algiers, Tunisia, and what we would call Libya.
I think people still have that prejudice today. just look at what is happening in somalia. it’s all part of a subconscious racism. these are black muslims so we don’t idealize them.
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In the past, slavery was essential to the pirates of the Barbary Coast. These pirates were much more considerate than the pirates of the Caribbean who were looking for loot. Barbary pirates didn’t kill people because they wanted to sell them. the same tactics are being used today. pirates want to intimidate people without hurting them. they want ransom. they relied on shock and amazement and the Somali pirates do the exact same thing.
There is this great statistic that in the 17th century alone about a million Europeans were sold into slavery. But let’s not forget that the same thing happened in North Africa: about the same number were also sold into slavery in southern Europe in places like Granada in Spain. Fisher points out that it is a two-way street. The West is not without blame. We cheated and lied too. We’re not talking about heroes, we’re talking about criminals. Regardless of what you want to think, pirates were, and still are today, bad men who do bad things. As for whether the barbarian pirates or the pirates of the caribbean were the worst, that entirely depends on what your ideological point of view is.
more on the Barbary pirates in his next book.
Nabil Matar is a brilliant author. has cornered the market in revisionist history. he looks at how britain relates to barbarism. he goes back to seventeenth-century English sources that described “the Turk,” that kind of catch-all term for Muslims at the time. these sources are like a daily mail editorial, as full of fanaticism and prejudice as the responses to islam today. and killing is a mirror of western culture and shows the prejudices we have about an entire civilization.
Your latest book has an amazing and unexpected story.
yes, it’s amazing. des ekin is a man who tells this story with the great enthusiasm and narrative style of a journalist. In 1631 a Dutch renegade named Morat Rais sailed to the south coast of Ireland. him one night he landed outside the small town of baltimore in county cork and kidnapped 107 protestant settlers and took them to algeria and sold them. At that time Ireland was considered a nest of pirates. the Irish sympathized with the Barbary pirates, because they were anti-English and paid well. in the 17th century there were breweries on the west coast of ireland where change was obtained in algerian dollars, there was a lot of trade going on. There is some controversy in the story about what made Morat choose Baltimore. some say he was headed to a richer town on the coast, but he got discouraged because he was heavily armed. The idea is that Morat captured someone who gave him this privileged information and sent him to Baltimore because they were Protestants and the informant was Catholic.
with all these books and research for your own book, what kind of parallels have you found with pirates past and present?
what strikes me the most is that the pirates in the books by peter leeson and john latimer are presented as heroes. there is something romantic about them. you don’t see the same romance attached to islamic barbary pirates. they are seen as the other, the enemy. when an english pirate like morat converted to islam, he was seen as the ultimate betrayal. they had gone to the other. How is it that jack sparrow from pirates of the caribbean is funny and glamorous and we can laugh at his antics and yet we don’t do the same with the Somali pirates?
If there’s a movie in development right now, it won’t be about a brave band of Somali pirates. It will be about a clean-cut American military figure, Tom Cruise, who fights against overwhelming odds in the Gulf of Aden.
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